Jaffa Port

This guide to Jaffa Port centers on a March morning in 1799, when roughly two thousand one hundred Ottoman soldiers, having surrendered to a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte after his envoys were killed during negotiations, were led down to this shore with their hands bound. It also follows what came after for Napoleon's own army, a plague that tore through his camp within weeks and forced him to pull his troops out of Jaffa for good. Fishermen still tie their boats beside the jagged rocks just past the breakwater, in what may be the oldest working harbor on earth.